Hitman convicted due to fitness watch location data

An alleged hitman was nabbed thanks PS data on fitness watches. A Liverpool jury has found Mark Fellows guilty of the 2015 murder of mob boss Paul Massey in part thanks to location info from his Garmin Forerunner. Oops. An expert inspecting the watch’s info discovered that Fellows had recorded a 35-minute trip that took him to a field just outside Massey’s home ahead of the murder.

It seemed like he was scouting the route he would take later to make the hit, and this claim is supported by cell site and CCTV evidence showing Fellows driving his car past Massey’s house several times in the week before the slaying. That’s very damning indeed. I guess he didn’t realize that this technology could backfire on him.

Massey’s murder had gone unsolved until the 2018 killing of his associate John Kinsella, where surveillance footage showed Fellows biking a similar scouting route before pulling the trigger. So law enforcement looked to see if there were any connections to the Massey case. Fellows had a GPS jammer in his car when police investigated in 2018, so he knew enough to avoid location data at that point, but he didn’t have one when he was scouting Massey three years earlier. Technology has convicted him now.